When we left off last week, the prophet Yonah had just been spewed out of the belly of the big fish that had swallowed him three days earlier. What was it like to be inside the belly of this big fish? The Sages have some unique ideas about that.
At the creation of the world, G-d made a fish intended to harbor Jonah. He was so large that the prophet was as comfortable inside him as in a spacious synagogue. The eyes of the fish served Jonah as windows, and, besides, there was a diamond, which shone as brilliantly as the sun at midday, so that Jonah could see all things in the sea down to its very bottom. (Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, vol. 4, pg. 249.)
Sounds wonderful and comfortable, doesn’t it? Heck, you can almost imagine it came equipped with a full kitchen and bathroom faucets! Unfortunately, this is one tradition that is rooted in an active imagination, rather than fact or history. While we can trust that Yonah was inside the belly of the big fish for three days, we know that it could not have been a pleasant time. No fish exists whose eyes are like windows and who keeps a diamond in his gullet to light things up for anything it might swallow.
What is far more likely is that Yonah was alone in a dark, smelly, uncomfortable place. While this may seem an unkind way for Adonai, G-d, to treat Yonah, keep in mind that this is precisely what Yonah was seeking; we are told in the very first chapter than Yonah wanted to get as far away from G-d and his calling as possible, and G-d responded by giving him a taste of what that experience is like. In the belly of the big fish, among other things, Yonah probably encountered pain from exposure to the fish’s digestive juices, danger from any teeth, complete dark and a feeling of being completely alone, completely cut off from Adonai.
Yonah’s own words in chapter 2 confirm this when he cries out to G-d, saying, “from the belly of Sh’ol I cried.” Sh’ol is a Hebrew word that is often used to describe what we call Hell – eternal separation from the presence of Adonai, Our G-d. If Yonah is calling his time in the belly of the big fish Hell, we can be pretty confident that his time there was not spent on a magical mystery tour with a diamond lighting the place up.
Tags: bathroom faucets, big fish, Jonah